Pedestrian detection plays a key role in video surveillance and pedestrian counting in a defined area, such as a store, a street, or a sports stadium. A number of methods may be used to detect pedestrians: (a) Monocular Video Pedestrian detection based on single frame picture, (b) Monocular Video Pedestrian detection based on frame motion information; (c) Pedestrian detection based on binocular vision, and (d) Pedestrian detection using 3D data acquisition system etc. Method (a) only utilizes the color and texture information of monocular RGB images. For targets difficult to be distinguished such as shadow, footprints, or a pedestrian wearing a hat, its robustness is poor and misdetection occurs often. Method (b) extracts the motion information of pedestrians based on their edge features between subsequent frames, and the detection results and robustness are both good for pedestrians in motion. However, it is not very good for stationary pedestrians since the edge features between subsequent frames are not easy to be extracted and pedestrian detection often fails. Method (c) makes use of binocular information for more accurate pedestrian detection results. But the existing method is only to use the disparity maps to select regions of interest, pedestrian detection in the area of interest is still based on monocular RGB image characteristics. Therefore, this method can only be used to remove false pedestrian targets (such as shadows, footprints), and the detection effect of special pedestrian targets such as those wearing hats is still poor. With the help of the pedestrian detection method depending on 3D data acquisition equipment, the three-dimensional locations can be accurately determined by collecting three-dimensional information using method (d). However, this approach requires the use of additional expensive 3D data acquisition systems such as LiDAR, which is difficult to be equipped in common public places, so this method is less practical in practical scenarios.
Therefore, a heretofore unaddressed need still exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.